The mistake beginners make when hiring
Our options aren’t always laid out this easily. (Image by Kohji Asakawa)
When you’re looking for that one perfect person, you won’t get it right on the first try.
We accept that this is a big part of dating. Some of us give up early on, but most of us manage to hang in there until we find someone who is right for us.
However, there is a lot of heartbreak along the way. We get discouraged when we think we’ve found the right person, and they turn out not to be.
We get positively demoralized when we aren’t meeting anyone at all. We wonder if the right person is even out there.
There are some parallels to the hiring process, from the idea that we rarely get it right on the first try to the fact that people don’t always turn out to be who you thought they were.
However, there’s one thing that I’ve observed in those who have little hiring experience that would be sort of funny in the dating process.
Actually, it matches dating customs from hundreds of years ago.
What happens is that the business owners begin by thinking that the have to already know someone who would be a good candidate for the role in order to ascertain whether making a hire is viable.
First they consider whether anyone they know personally could do the job.
Having identified a pool of two or three candidates, they then mull over the reasons either circumstantial (“Oh, he would probably want something full time”) or personal (“She’s a big gossip”) that things might not work out.
They then sit uneasily with the possibility of hiring one of these people or conclude that finding the right person is likely to be futile.
Even if they are able to think past the people they know, they are skeptical that they will be able to find someone that has the qualities they’re looking for.
“I want to find a person who has experience, but if they have experience they’ll probably want to do it their way and won’t be willing to follow my process.”
“I suppose we could hire a caterer for the event, but it’s probably exorbitantly expensive.”
The solution here is to look past the current circumstances and recognize that there are infinite possibilities.
We can, like Jane and Michael Banks in Mary Poppins, determine the exact qualities we’re looking for and continue to search until we find someone who fits those criteria.
We can decide what we’re willing to compromise on to make the process a bit quicker, but we’re allowed to have dealbreakers.
So, what’s underlying the business owner’s attempt to skip directly to making an offer to their sister-in-law or giving up completely?
First, fear. They’re afraid of wasting time, afraid of getting it wrong, afraid of being rejected, afraid that what they want doesn’t exist.
Second, they don’t even realize that they’re trying to follow a shortcut. They’re used to being resourceful and finding unconventional solutions to problems; maybe they’re used to clients and customers coming to them through word of mouth. It doesn’t occur to them that they might need to do more vigorous marketing to find their next employee, contractor, or service provider.
The solution is to recognize that we don’t always have the ultimate solution in the moment when we identify the problem. There may be more steps to follow and more stones to turn over.
We don’t necessarily have to conduct a nationwide search; we just have to acknowledge that the person we hire might not be someone we already know (or know of). We might need to cast a wider net (not that we’re intending to entrap anyone).
This might sound absurdly obvious; to the non-business owners reading this, I’m sure it does. But this issue has come up often enough that I know it isn’t obvious to everyone. And I have learned that this is something I must address directly when I’m coaching someone through the pain of making a hire.
The world is big enough that whatever and whoever we’re looking for is probably out there. As terrifying as it is to not have the answer right away, our willingness to put ourselves out there with patience and open-mindedness can yield results that are beneficial not only to ourselves, but to the people who will be as delighted to find us as we are to finally find them.
